ECB chief Mario Draghi returns to London next week almost 10 months on from his seminal “whatever it takes” speech to the global financial community in The City – a speech that not only drew a line under the euro financial crisis by flagging the ECB’s sovereign debt backstop OMT but one that framed the determination of the G4 central banks at large to reflate their economies via extraordinary monetary easing. Since then we’ve seen the Fed effectively commit to buying an addition trillion dollars of bonds this year to get the U.S. jobless rate down toward 6.5%, followed by the ‘shock-and-awe’ tactics of the new Japanese government and Bank of Japan to end decades.

Emerging equities may have significantly underperformed their richer peers so far this year (they are about 4 percent in the red compared with gains of more than 6 percent for their MSCI’s index of developed stocks) , but almost a third of high net-worth individuals are betting on a rebound in coming months.

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Investors keen to wade deeper into the euro zone’s quieter waters will have 765 billion euros, or just over $1 trillion, worth of fresh government bonds offered to them this year, nearly 8 percent less than in 2012, Deutsche Bank writes in a report.

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Yet another Greek impasse, a French downgrade, ongoing DC cliff dodging and a downturn in Citi’s G10 economic surprise index (though not yet in the US one) could have been plausible reasons this week to extend the post-election global markets swoon. But at 8 consecutive days in the red up to last Friday, that was the longest losing streak since last November, and a lot of froth had been shaken off these year-end markets already.

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It’s been another rum old week market-wise, with global stocks off another 2 percent or more and recording seven straight days in the red for the first time since August. Throw any spin you like at the reasoning, but the pretty predictable post-election hiatus on U.S. fiscal cliff worries now seem to be front and centre of everything. And that will just has to play itself out now, leaving markets stuck in this funk until they come up with the fix. The running consensus still seems to be that some solution will be reached, but no one wants to be too brave about it. And given the cliff is one of the few good explanations for the sharp divergence between the equity market and still rising US economic surprises, you can see why many feel the US fiscal standoff is merely delaying a resumption of the rally.

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Four years of relentless austerity in many of the euro zone’s most debt-hobbled countries have forced many of their youngest and sometimes brightest workers to grab the plane, train or boat and emigrate in search of work. For countries with a long history of emigration, such as Ireland, this is depressingly familar — coming just 20 years after the country’s last debt crisis and national belt-tightening in the 1980s crescendoed, with the exit of some 40,ooo a year in 1989/90 from a population of just 3-1/2 million people.

The Olympic medals have all been handed out and the athletes are on their way home. Which countries surpassed expectations and which ones did worse than expected? And did this have anything to do with the state of their economies?

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Wealthy investors across Europe are confident about the future of the euro zone and the efficiency of unpopular austerity policies, with the rich in bailed-out Ireland and Spain topping the list, according to a survey published by J.P. Morgan Private Bank on Wednesday. The study, conducted in May and June, said:

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Equities in the countries most exposed to the euro zone crisis seem to be being hit especially hard this year. The Datastream index of shares in Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain has a total return of -5.3% this year compared to +8.9% for a euro zone index excluding those countries.